Toward the challenges of 1980;

Page 1

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there."—Charles E Kettering
Toward
16 By Harvey H. Segal
Man has an insatiable curiosity about
the shape of the future and it is hardly
likely to be concealed as the curtain
rises on the decade of the 1970s.
Our early ancestors were princi­pally
concerned with physical survival
in the immediate future, imploring
their gods for protection from plague
and pillage, droughts and floods, fires
and frosts. Modern man's interest in
prognostication is directed largely to­ward
the unknowns in the economy.
Forecasts of the economic future are
based upon an impressive body of his­torical
knowledge as well as techniques
for linking the past with the present
and, hopefully, with the future. But
sophistication is no insurance against
costly failure in the treacherous game
of forecasting.
Ten years ago, it will be remem­bered,
there was much brave talk about
the "Swinging Sixties" and the unlim­ited
economic horizons of a decade of
rapid growth that lay ahead. Yet half
the decade was to pass before the
country was lifted out of economic
stagnation, from the slough of slow
growth and an unacceptably high level
of unemployment. The euphoria of that
decade therefore stands as a warning
against glib optimism in the 1970s.
Safety in forecasting can be pur­chased,
but only at the price of retreat­ing
to the trite or innocuous, such as
the statement that the only thing cer­tain
in the uncertain future is the per­sistence
of change. But there is a
middle ground approach that offers
valuable insights into the future by
ignoring the short-term reverses and
twists of business fortunes—the saw-toothed
fluctuations of the wall chart
curves. It involves the extension of
well established trends, the long-term
tendencies that are not likely to be
quickly reversed and which exert a
powerful influence in shaping the
course of the economy.
What is required of us today, if we
want to understand and master our
future, is a blend of capabilities. We
need to combine the realistic, hard-headed
approach of the experienced
and skeptical accountant with the ap­preciation
of the new and significant
among many emerging social trends—
which is more in the domain of the
far-sighted social scientist. In other
words, we must use both the telescope
and the microscope in order to discern
the big picture as well as the details
of our future.
Population growth, a fundamental
of any excursion into the future, is
influenced by persistent forces—eco­nomic,
social and technological—that
change gradually and in a reasonably
predictable fashion. New break­throughs
in medical knowledge and
techniques, as well as the more effec­tive
application of what is already
known, will in all likelihood accelerate
the decline in infant mortality and in­crease
the longevity of the adult popu­lation.
Affluence should help sustain a
high birth rate, but one that is lower
than in the 1940s and 1950s.
Thus, barring some misfortunes of
catastrophic dimension, such as the
outbreak of a thermonuclear war, there
will be net increases in the population
of the United States during every year
of the 1970s. Forecasting that growth
—and with it the composition of the
population by age groups, color and
other characteristics—hinges largely on
predicting the fertility and birth rates.
Other trends are far less stable over
time, growth of income and of govern­ment
expenditures being examples of
trajectories that are subject to the fickle
deflections of fleeting, short-term influ­ences.
The more regular, firmly estab-
Harvey H. Segal is Chairman of the Economics
Department of the University of Massachusetts at
Boston. He has been an economics specialist on
the editorial staffs of The New York Times and
the Washington Post.